“Wellness” Products Vs. Lifestyle Choices

It’s no secret that health has always been a big business. The current health and nutrition buzzword is “wellness” and it’s been applied to everything from weight loss products and programs to preventative medicine diets, exercise regimens and more. It’s a general term which describes a general sense of physical well-being, not the mere absence of illness, but a sense of health and vibrancy as well.

But has wellness become focused too much on marketing rather than actual health? In many ways, there’s too much emphasis on “wellness” solutions as cures to what ails us, and not enough examination into why people are ailing in the first place.

The Product as the Solution

Headaches are pretty normal occurrences. For many people, the first thing that goes through their mind if they get a headache is “Where’s the Tylenol?”

This isn’t mere happenstance. Decades of marketing for pharmaceutical, health and nutritional products has had its desired effect. When people experience a symptom of almost any illness, their instinct is to reach for an external solution.

Social conditioning has trained people to think, by default, that the solution to a health problem is to take something.

“Take this pill, buy this supplement, follow this program, and you will be healthy again” is the message that’s reinforced again and again in a hundred different ways. Currently, many “wellness” solutions fit into this same paradigm. It’s the latest label for the same old dynamic.

Does this mean that the product, food or program in question is bogus? Not necessarily; some of them are very effective. But the same dynamic is at work whether the solution is snake oil or legit: Someone reaches for some external product to fix a problem with their body, rather than thinking, “What caused this to happen in the first place? What can I change?”

This situation shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the Global Wellness Institute estimated wellness to be a 3.4 TRILLION dollar industry in 2014.